Gus had glanced up briefly while the flivver was on its silent way down. He’d made out the barely-legible “Falmouth County Clerk’s Office” lettered over the faded paint on its door, shrugged, and gone on with what he was doing.
Gus was a big man. His shoulders were heavy and broad; his chest was deep, grizzled with thick, iron-gray hair. His stomach had gotten a little heavier with the years, but the muscles were still there under the layer of flesh. His upper arms were thicker than a good many thighs, and his forearms were enormous.
His face was seamed by a network of folds and creases. His flat cheeks were marked out by two deep furrows that ran from the sides of his bent nose, merged with the creases bracketing his wide lips, and converged toward the blunt point of his jaw. His pale blue eyes twinkled above high cheekbones which were covered with wrinkles. His close-cropped hair was as white as cotton.
Only repeated and annoying exposure would give his body a tan, but his face was permanently browned. The pink of his body sunburn was broken in several places by white scar tissue. The thin line of a knife cut emerged from the tops of his pants and faded out across the right side of his stomach. The other significant area of scarring lay across the uneven knuckles of his heavy-fingered hands.
The clerk looked at the mailbox to make sure of the name, checking it against an envelope he was holding in one hand. He stopped and looked at Gus again, mysteriously nervous.
Gus abruptly realized that he probably didn’t present a reassuring appearance. With all the screening and raking he’d been doing, there’d been a lot of dust in the air. Mixed with perspiration, it was all over his face, chest, arms, and back. Gus knew he didn’t look very gentle even at his cleanest and best-dressed. At the moment, he couldn’t blame the clerk for being skittish.
He tried to smile disarmingly.
The clerk ran his tongue over his lips, cleared his throat with a slight cough, and jerked his head toward the mail-box. “Is that right? You Mr. Kusevic?” Gus nodded. “That’s right. What can I do for you?” The clerk held up the envelope. “Got a notice here from the County Council,” he muttered, but he was obviously much more taken up by his effort to equate Gus with the rose arbor, the neatly edged and carefully tended flower beds, the hedges, the flagstoned walk, the small goldfish pond under the willow tree, the white-painted cottage with its window boxes and bright shutters, and the curtains showing inside the sparkling windows.
Gus waited until the man was through with his obvious thoughts, but something deep inside him sighed quietly. He had gone through this moment of bewilderment with so many other people that he was quite accustomed to it, but that is not the same thing as being oblivious.
“Well, come on inside,” he said after a decent interval. “It’s pretty hot out here, and I’ve got some beer in the cooler.”
The clerk hesitated again. “Well, all I’ve got to do is deliver this notice—” he said, still looking around. “Got the place fixed up real nice, don’t you?”
Gus smiled. “It’s my home. A man likes to live in a nice place. In a hurry?”
The clerk seemed to be troubled by something in what Gus had said. Then he looked up suddenly, obviously just realizing he’d been asked a direct question. “Huh?”
“You’re not in any hurry, are you? Come on in; have a beer. Nobody’s expected to be a ball of fire on a spring afternoon.”
The clerk grinned uneasily. “No… nope, guess not.” He brightened. “O.K.! Don’t mind if I do.”
Gus ushered him into the house, grinning with pleasure. Nobody’d seen the inside of the place since he’d fixed it up; the clerk was the first visitor he’d had since moving in. There weren’t even any delivery men; Boonesboro was so small you had to drive in for your own. shopping. There wasn’t any mail carrier service, of course—not that Gus ever received any mail.
He showed the clerk into the living room. “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.” He went quickly out to the kitchen, took some beer out of the cooler, loaded a tray with glasses, a bowl of chips and pretzels, and the beer, and carried it out.
The clerk was up, looking around the library that covered two of the living room walls.
Looking at his expression, Gus realized with genuine regret that the man wasn’t the kind to doubt whether an obvious clod like Kusevic had read any of this stuff. A man like that could still be talked to, once the original misconceptions were knocked down. No, the clerk was too plainly mystified that a grown man would fool with books. Particularly a man like Gus; now, one of these kids that messed with college politics, that was something else. But a grown man oughtn’t to act like that.
Gus saw it had been a mistake to expect anything of the clerk. He should have known better, whether he was hungry for company or not. He’d always been hungry for company, and it was time he realized, once and for all, that he just plain wasn’t going to find any.
He set the tray down on the table, uncapped a beer quickly, and handed it to the man.
“Thanks,” the clerk mumbled. He took a swallow, sighed loudly, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked around the room again. “Cost you a lot to have all this put in?”
Gus shrugged. “Did most of it myself. Built the shelves and furniture; stuff like that. Some of the paintings I had to buy, and the books and records.”
The clerk grunted. He seemed to be considerably ill at ease, probably because of the notice he’d brought, whatever it was. Gus found himself wondering what it could possibly be, but, now that he’d made the mistake of giving the man a beer, he had to wait politely until it was finished before he could ask.
He went over to the TV set. “Baseball fan?” he asked the clerk.
“Sure!”
“Giants-Kodiaks ought to be on.” He switched the set on and pulled up a hassock, fitting on it so as not to get one of the chairs dirty. The clerk wandered over and stood looking at the screen, taking slow swallows of his beer.
The second game had started, and Halsey’s familiar figure appeared on the screen as the set warmed up. The lithe young lefthander was throwing with his usual boneless motion, apparently not working hard at all, but the ball was whipping past the batters with a sizzle that the home plate microphone was picking up clearly.
Gus nodded toward Halsey. “He’s quite a pitcher, isn’t he?”
The clerk shrugged. “Guess so. Walker’s their best man, though.”
Gus sighed as he realized he’d forgotten himself again. The clerk wouldn’t pay much attention to Halsey, naturally.
But he was getting a little irritated at the man, with his typical preconceptions of what was proper and what wasn’t, of who had a right to grow roses and who didn’t.
“Offhand,” Gus said to the clerk, “could you tell me what Halsey’s record was, last year?”
The clerk shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. Wasn’t bad— I remember that much. 13-7, something like that.”
Gus nodded to himself. “Uh-huh. How’d Walker do?”
“Walker! Why, man, Walker just won something like twenty-five games, that’s all. And three no-hitters. How’d Walker do? Huh!”
Gus shook his head. “Walker’s a good pitcher, all right-but he didn’t pitch any no-hitters. And he only won eighteen games.”
The clerk wrinkled his forehead. He opened his mouth to argue and then stopped. He looked like a sure-thing bettor who’d just realized that his memory had played him a trick.
“Say—I think you’re right! Huh! Now what the Sam Hill made me think Walker was the guy? And you know something—I’ve been talking about him all winter, and nobody once called me wrong?” The clerk scratched his head. “Now, somebody pitched them games! Who the dickens was it?” He scowled in concentration.